Are horseshoe crabs being bled to death?

Blood from horseshoe crabs is an essential part of the biomedical industry. The unique blue blood that comes from the crabs help to ensure that vaccines and medical supplies remain free from bacterial contamination. But a new study raises fears that the method of bleeding wild horseshoe crabs could be affecting the population as numbers fall along parts of the US east coast.

With as much as 30% of blood taken from a crab during the bleeding process and as many as 30% dying during the process researchers from the Plymouth State University (PSU) and the University of New Hampshire (UNH) think that a better way needs to be found to make sure the industry is sustainable.

“The crabs are very heavily bled — about 30 percent or more of their blood is taken, and that’s a fair amount,” says Chris Chabot, professor of neurobiology at PSU and a co-author on the study.

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Horseshoe Crab’s Death March Recorded In Stone

An unusually complete fossil unearthed in Bavarian Germany was found to depict the tragic last moments of a prehistoric horseshoe crab as it stumbled for its life over 150 million years ago.

The crab’s fossilized track, which is over 31 feet in length, displays both the beginning and end of its death march that was the result of the arthropod falling into a stagnant lagoon, according to a recent report published in the journal Ichnos.

The rare fossil was discovered in 2002 in the Solnhofen Lithographic Limestone of Bavaria in Germany, where the famous Archaeopteryx fossil was found.

“When I first laid my eyes on this specimen in 2008, while on display, I realized how special this fossil truly was. It’s not particularly rare to find these horseshoe crabs at the end of their short traces, but nothing quite as substantially large and scientifically important as this; trackways and tracemakers preserved together in the fossil record is rare,” said lead author Dean Lomax, a curator of paleontology at Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery in England.

A violent storm or an encounter with a predator could have driven the crab into the deadly water, the researchers hypothesized. They noted that the quality of preservation that the murky lagoon provided allowed them to reconstruct the animal’s final minutes.

“The lagoon that the animal found itself in was anoxic, so at the bottom of these lagoons there was no oxygen and nothing was living,” Lomax told BBC News.

“This horseshoe crab [Mesolimulus walchi] found itself on the lagoon floor and we can tell by looking at the trace that the animal righted itself, managed to get on to its feet and began to walk,” he explained.

Lomax said that close examination of the detailed fossil showed that the walking patterns and the animal’s behavior started to change after the animal landed in the water. The leg impressions made by the crab became deeper and more erratic as it progressed along its death march.

Continued:   http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112690323/death-march-fossil-crab-091012/ 
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